creators surviving in times of plenty

[miriam_e]

Okay... the lesson is don't write something while tired and post it without checking it properly in the cold, hard light of day. While not everything I wrote in that post was crap, so much was erratic that I'm too embarrassed to let it stand.

I'll rewrite it more rationally and repost it some time in the future.

For the record, I think the main points still stand. Donation holds a lot of promise in a world where filesharing is easy and costs almost nothing. We artists need to find a way to harness the power of the internet.

Comments

[ratfan.livejournal.com]

We artists have to find a way to get paid properly. I don't make any more from selling short stories than I did 10 years ago. Not long ago I read online the words of an editor who was bitching about the fact that most of the people who buy sf anthologies/magazines are themselves writers, who don't make much money and therefore limit what they buy. We need more cashed up readers, apparently. That'd be nice. If writers could get paid properly, that would help. I've heard all the reasons why we can only be paid a pittance, some of them valid, but if that's so, then it is hardly fair to complain that said people can't afford to buy many books, is it?

sorry, Miriam, this is probably off your point as well, except that traditional markets aren't working for us. Making the net work for us would indeed be good but I'm afraid at the moment this seems like a motherhood statement to me. To politicians this phrase means a plan or statement which would be very nice but has no clear strategy for getting there from here.

That said, I hope a way can be found!

Ratfan

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I read an interview with Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, who said that he'd asked publishers why the cost of books had risen so astronomically in the last few decades. In the USA, from 25 cents for a paperback in 1955, the same price as a gallon of petrol, to $10 now -- 40 times as much -- while petrol has gone up 10 times to $2.50 per gallon.

I receive messages from publisher as famous as the top of Encyclopedia Britannica, constantly informing me of price hikes in paper, binding, shipping, storage and royalties. But the truth is, that the blank books I use for journals haven't changed price at all since I bought my first ones back in the 1960's, and with a vastly improved quality of binding that now includes a variety of cloth covers, with a choice of lined or unlined paper and two to three times as many pages at the same price for 396 pages today as we paid for 160 pages in a cardboard binding in the 1960's.

Each and every time these false statements are presented, my response is to personally go to the bookstore and buy, not just look at, these products available today so I can tell you about them.

Recently the prices for the blank hardback books dropped, perhaps on temporarily, but the last purchase I made from that shelf was 25% less than the price I paid previously, significantly less than I had ever paid before, and for a better quality binding and more pages, as mentioned.

Something is definitely wrong with the arguments made for prices going up for the raw materials and shipping, if it is a price NOT going up for blank books that require that same paper, binding, shipping, warehousing etc.

Add to that, the fact that publishers are now paying authors less than before. It used to be 10%, I think it has now gone down to 8%. There are vast numbers of books sold. Where is all the money going?

As I see it, our only choice to work out how to use the net effectively. It is the only way to cut out all the middlemen and give creators a chance to earn some kind of living.

The question is, how? That's what I hoped to investigate in the piece I've deleted above. I'll repost a more carefully written version soon.